The advantage of making patterns in Illustrator is that you can easily edit the colors, rearrange the content and enlarge the content or rotate 45 degrees and still maintain a small file size.

Open Illustrator, select New, then letter size portrait or landscape. Select RGB for this exercise. CMYK is used for commercial printing and you may not be able to open your file in the scrapbooking program of your choice. You will be using the black arrow tool (Figure 2) below for selecting and moving your art. You will need to open Swatches or a Color Swatch from the Library, shown (Figure 3)

The basic principle of creating a pattern is as follows: See (Figure 1) above
Start your design on the left. Anything in the middle can be placed anywhere that looks good. Whatever is on the left has to be on the right. Shown above with black arrows. Whatever is on the top has to be on the bottom. Shown above in red arrows.

(Figures: 4, 5, left; Figures: 6, 7 right)

Using the Toolbar select the Rectangle tool. (Figure 4 top). Draw a rectangle. The example in Figure 8 is .9 inches x 1 inch. If you click on the Rectangle tool on the drawing board a palette (Figure 7) will show up and you can type the dimensions in.

Fill your rectangle with color (Figure 6) so you will be able to see the background. On the Toolbar (Figure 4) bottom you will see a square that is filled with pink and a square that is stroked yellow and hollow. To move between fill and stroke simply type an X and it will toggle between the fill and stroke. We will not be using strokes for any of this exercise. To draw the circles use the Toolbar. (Figure 4) shown above is a Rectangle, if you pull the bar across it will show circles and polygons too (Figure 5). Choose the Circle. You can click on the Circle and the Ellipse palette will come up (just like the Rectangle) or if you hold the Shift key you can draw a proportional circle.

(Figures: 8, 9)

Place your circle at the top like above (Figure 8), Select your blue circle (Figure 8) using the black arrow, now hold down the Enter key on your Keyboard and a Move palette will show up. Type in .9 inch and select Copy.

Figures: 10, 11).

Go ahead and draw some more dots to put on the top of your rectangle. Select all the dots on the top with your black arrow tool by holding the Shift Key down on your Keyboard while selecting the dots.

Select the Enter Key and the Move palette will come up. (Figure 11) Type -1 in. and Copy.

NOTE: When moving Vertically Down - Vertically Up +. Must select Copy. Go ahead and fill in the dots on the left (copy .9 inches) to the right and go ahead and fill in the dots in the middle.

(Figure 12, 13 right:)

To create a pattern to be used in Photoshop:

Select all the dots with your black arrow and group them (Shown above (Figure 13) Quick Key -(Control G on the PC/Command G on the Mac). Bring the yellow rectangle to the front (Figure 13) Quick Key - (Shift + Control + ]) so that it covers the top of your design. Now under Object, (Figure 13) select Crop Area, then Make and it will put crop marks around your design (Figure 12 bottom). You can now open this up in Photoshop and place this into patterns to be used with your new creations. See tutorial_pat.html.

Save your file as Polkas.ai or Polkas.eps depending on what program you are using.  For example you can only use an eps when placing into Quark Express. NOTE: Check your programs to see if you can place an eps. If not you can save them as jpg or tif.

To create a pattern in Illustrator

Make sure the yellow rectangle is on the bottom Quick Key (Figure 13) (Shift + Control + [) Select all the Dots and Group them if you haven't already. Turn your yellow background to NO COLOR. No color is the red line that is at the bottom of the Toolbar see Figure 4 below the stroke and the fill is an [ / ]. Select your gouped dots and your transparent rectangle with your black arrow. (do not group your background rectangle it needs to be loose on the bottom)

Figure 14.

(Figure 15)

....and under Edit select Define Pattern. Give the pattern a name and then check to see if your pattern is correct. Draw a rectangle 8x8 or fill up the page and select the pattern from your Swatches (see Figure 6) and it should look similar to this below but bigger. Save your file as Polkas.ai if you are using Adobe programs. Save it as Polkas.eps if you will be using other programs such as Freehand, Corel, or PageMaker. If you are working in Microsoft Publisher or programs that do not support vector art, you can export the art to TIF, PNG, JPG, WMF.